Thank you so much.
Very quickly, I know that in the last set of questions, Chelsea Minhas from Covenant House mentioned that it's best to help families in the home at the beginning instead of apprehending kids out of it. The aftermath of that is quite significant.
My question is for Amber Crowe. In July 2020, in noting deaths of young people, Brittany Hobson from APTN said:
According to statistics from Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth Daphne Penrose's office, there have been 1,605 deaths in the last decade of youths ages 0 to 17. Of those, 590 are what Penrose calls “reviewable deaths” meaning the person had some contact with the child welfare system within the past year of their life. In total, 131 were classified as in government care at the time of their deaths.
This is alarming. We know that for kids going into care, especially young women and girls, it's been called a pipeline into MMIWG2S. We know that the impact on kids of being in care, through so many studies and reports, is detrimental to the mental health of children.
Do you agree that more funding resources need to be focused on keeping families together rather than continuing to prop up systems, including the child welfare system, that often have very poor outcomes?